Georgia Run-Off 2022
How Do Political Campaigns Target Voters?
Methodology
We coded over 3,000 US political advertisers during the 2022 midterm campaigns to better understand how campaigns use different targeting methods made available by Meta. To do this, we used data from the Meta Ad Library, most often the new ‘Audience’ data which gives some detail on how pages target their ads.
To better understand the Georgia runoff election, we kept only advertisers who:
- Advertised in the last 7 days (Nov 25th - Dec 1st 2022)
- Advertised in the last 30 days (Nov 2nd - Dec 1st 2022) and spent money in Georgia.
Note: Meta only provides 7, 30 and 90 days windows for the targeting data in their Ad Library. Meta’s data also lags by a few days. We will update this report as soon as new data is available.
Topline statistics
First, Democrat (Warnock)-supporting pages are clearly and consistently outspending Replubican (Walker)-supporting pages. Democrat-supporting pages have also run many more ads.
Nov 25th - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 7 Days)
| All Democrat-supporting pages | All Republican-supporting pages | |
|---|---|---|
Total Number of Advertisers |
156 |
185 |
Top Advertiser |
|
|
Total Number of Ads |
4,457 |
2,922 |
Total Spend ($) |
1,662,089 |
918,448 |
Nov 2nd - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 30 Days)
| All Democrat-supporting pages | All Republican-supporting pages | |
|---|---|---|
Total Number of Advertisers |
845 |
759 |
Top Advertiser |
|
|
Total Number of Ads |
39,847 |
16,468 |
Total Spend |
21,703,754 |
10,635,767 |
Spending, broken down by targeting method
How much did campaigns spend on different targeting methods?
Note that most advertisers spend the vast majority of their budget (~65%+) on Meta’s Custom Audiences.
Nov 25th - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 7 Days)
Nov 2nd - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 30 Days)
Top Contested (Interest) Audiences
Here, we show the top most contested interest audiences, i.e. where both Democrats and Republicans have spent considerable amounts of money competing to reach voters with the same interests.
Nov 25th - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 7 Days)
Nov 2nd - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 30 Days)
Top Excluded Interests
On Meta, advertisers can also choose to exclude certain audiences from seeing their ads. The graph below shows which audiences are being excluded and how much pages are paying for ads that exclude them. Interestingly, Democrat-supporting pages seem to both include and exclude likely conservative leaning audiences (NASCAR, Hunting). Pro-Republican pages exclude people interested in Veganism and Toyota Prius.
Nov 25th - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 7 Days)
Nov 2nd - Dec 1st 2022 (Last 30 Days)
ZIP Code Targeting
Both Democrat-supporting and Republican-supporting pages target voters in and around cities, most notably Atlanta.